virgin oil

[Vinay Chand]

I was asked in August by P. K. Thampan of the technologies available for separation of oil from cream. I must apologise for the time it has taken to come back to the issue but I realised that I personally had not paid detailed attention recently to the issue relying on the fact that if a turn key plant is secured from a source like Alfa Laval, there is a separator and then a clarifier and no need to question anything. On reading the request from my friend Thampan, I went back to my source material.

 

The best or most detailed discussion is found in Robert Hagenmaier's 'Coconut Aqueous Processing', still the definitive text in my opinion although possibly the last word was by Al Hansvold of Bradley Fairchild a decade later. Robert describes the basis of his preference for cream to be heated, evaporated, oil separated in a centrifuge and then the oil clarified with the added complication of extracting the residual oil from the sludge using liquid/liquid separation again with heat in the centrifuge. Hansvold was against all use of high heat and the resulting denaturing.

 

From an economic point of view, what results is a more fragrant oil, not everyone's preference for cooking purposes. The weakness with virgin oil is that it is only extracted using small scale inefficient extraction techniques that are not much more than up-scaled traditional extraction like that of klentic oil in Indonesia or that by halvii's in India. There are at least 3 paths to virgin oil. The traditional way of boiling and skimming, an industrial version in the use of heated oil with fresh meat and the milk-cream-oil route developed by Alfa Laval and others. Somewhere out there is also an equivalent to the cold press olive oil that sells for premium prices.

 

A great deal of attention has been paid to agreeing standards without paying sufficient consideration to the differences between quality from the three paths outlined above, let alone Hansvold's arguments which complicate things further. I don’t know readily although we can find out what the precise differences in quality specifications are but I know that there are significant differences. The reason why the task of finding out has not been urgent is that virgin oil is being produced in small quantities with little knowledge of marketing considerations that make it a village industry niche product that is difficult to sell at a profit. Frankly, the market research has been almost non existent and we have not gone far beyond the tip of the ice berg. We need to go much further to be able to command the premiums required to make virgin oil commercially more attractive than refined copra oil.

 

There are premium uses for virgin oil that have not been explored and there are implications of the milk or skimmed milk plus cream or the oil plus skimmed plus defat desiccated output ratios that have not been properly or widely appreciated from a feasibility point of view. Milk is three/four times as profitable as average oil prices. The premium for virgin has to be substantial to justify larger levels of production. There are premium uses that do command returns in excess of milk but they are not in the public domain. That results in a rather crude low value niche market for virgin oil so far.

   

Best wishes,
 
Vinay Chand
230, Finchley Road,
London NW3 6DJ, UK
Tel: 44-20-7794 5977
Fax: 44-20-7431 5715
vinay...@msn.com